Cold Winds, Long Winter
by Randomiss
Summary: The cold tides of winter tend to blow crowns this way and that. The season six finale as seen through the eyes of various characters. Focusing on the fates of Margaery, Tommen, Jaime, Cersei, Arya, Jon, Sansa, Melisandre, Tyrion and Daenerys. Multi-chap.
1. Margaery

**Cold Winds, Long Winter**

Margaery

Cersei is not there. Tommen is not there. The High Sparrow may be putrid with blind religious lunacy but Margaery's workings of the mind are not. Something is arot here. Loras' trial and the red worms branding his forehead as the Faith's trinket are suddenly a trifling thing.

Perhaps it is but a moment's unrest, Margaery tells herself. Tommen surely ought to come, her husband, her poor naive king.

But come he doesn't.

Concerns tumefy like an infected boil as the vast hall of the sept can no longer absorb the raised voices of the crowd. Cersei is not here. Neither is King Tommen. They all need to leave. Margaery has come to know the heinous paths the Queen-Mother's schemes usually spiral down. Margaery knows her ill devices, and she has grown to understand the mechanism of them. And now seems like the perfect time for somebody like Cersei to flash her teeth from the shadows.

She watches the High Sparrow put his minions to work, the serpent tightening its coils in her stomach. He is entrusting mere boys barely sporting half a beard with the crucial task of retrieving a woman that should never be underestimated. _Cersei Lannister would not allow herself to be bent like this. She is expecting this._

The lion is the grandest danger when the lesser things believe its claws to be uprooted. Margaery's palms slicken with worry. Cersei comes not. King Tommen comes not.

By the time she rushes down to the center of the seven-pointed star in a swish of chaste silk to confront the High Sparrow, she reckons they must be halfway dead already.

The High Sparrow does not listen. His little sparrows never rejoin them. Margaery can almost feel the slow burn of Cersei Lannister's blackhearted, ever-waiting eyes staring at her from afar, carving bloodied patterns on her back. The perverse lick of death is almost tangible as she drags Loras to the exit, only to ricochet against a buffer of black robes and pure madness.

Margaery cannot allow this. Her father is present, as is her brother. The whole of house Tyrell's future resides in this one room. She cannot die here. She mustn't.

She pushes out with all of her might against the chain wall of unflinching, tar-black robes, and yet her fiery demands and her appeals to reason, anybody's reason, achieve little more than Loras' feeble efforts next to her. She's always pushed harder than him, always been the fiercer one. And yet her heart wrenches to see him like this – a shell with its essence spilled to the floor and drained down the city canal.

Loras will not come to her aid, she sees. She doubts very much he's even capable of aiding himself. Once again the women must be strong where men are not. Once again it falls on her to be the one unflinching link that holds it all together. It is up to her, now, to ensure they all have a tomorrow to put the broken pieces back together. A tomorrow Cersei Lannister will go out of her way to deny them.

She tries with words again, these ones spilling hotter, sharper, more insistent from her pursed lips. The High Sparrow will not listen still, though there is a shift in the air. The room is twitching in the beginnings of fear, and so is Margaery.

She is out of her depth when reason fails her and clever words are slipping away from her grasp. She's never had anything else to rely on. She begins to suffocate on a string of words, all swallowed by the roaring clutter of the crowd.

Margaery might be seeing through where others fail, but Cersei Lannister has outplayed the High Sparrow, and through him, she's outplayed them all.

They're all going to die here unless she does something, Margaery realizes all of a sudden as her fists beat in futility against black fabric. The thought hits her like a slap across the face, remote and immediate as only death can ever be. Robes whisper all around in the tongue of cheap fabric. It's only a rough sort of leather, but it feels like forged iron, sturdy and unyielding as a Kinsguard's polished breastplate.

Margaery panics. She must do something, or else this place will be their tomb. She thinks of Loras and of her grandmother and of Highgarden, of the men she has buried in the ground and on high cliffs as her husbands, of a little girl walking through corridors framed in green who used to dream of a crown and a true king by her side.

It's all absurdly distant, what with all the cries and the screams. They all need out. There is not enough air here for the lot of them, and, as if to hasten their end, everybody has taken to gasping wildly, greedily, robbing the one next to them of their rightful breath.

She turns to the High Sparrow one final time, steeling herself for what's to come. His elderly face is blank canvas, though wrinkles break up his forehead into various sections as his eyebrows slowly interlock. And, just a moment before the world goes dark, numbness withdraws from him. His face turns into everybody else's faces: fright and shock crossbreed with something else and Margaery knows this is the end.

Her heart throbs louder than her thoughts. They all need out. They all need out.

The way out has been sealed. What are these alien creatures blocking her way?

She must be going mad with fear, because for a moment there, she swears she hears Cersei Lannister's malicious laughter exploding right behind her shoulder. It's low and throaty, just as she remembers it, like a rumbling beast beneath their feet, erupting from the recesses of the sept, and the entire ground is shaking in response to it.

Could it be anything short of a dragon?

The lucent green swims for but a moment.


	2. Tommen

Tommen

The sept is smoldering the way the hearth charcoal had on Joffrey's fifteenth name day, back when Tommen was still just the king's brother and the gilded ring of the crown did not weigh so awfully on his head. He had to barricade himself in his rooms that day, to keep Ser Pounce away from his kin's scratchy fingers, because the idea had struck Joffrey that he couldn't have his fun with any other kitten in King's Landing. But Tommen had defended his pet valiantly, refusing to unlock the heavy oaken door even when his brother threatened to have the wood burst in by the Hound.

Joffrey's wrath had been fearsome, but Tommen held his ground. Eventually, his brother had gotten bored of the game and left, Ser Pounce still whole and purring, safely tucked in his owner's lap. Tommen still feels proud of the achievement.

He hasn't been much of a true protector to anything since then, he thinks.

He was all alone in the room that day, as he is now, only the flames are somewhat different. Where before Tommen had found some warmth, some consolation in their playful yellow flicker, the fires eating up the remnants of the sept right now are cold and green and unforgiving, a juggernaut mounted by frosty winds that reach his spot in the Red Keep and whip his face with unmatched ruthlessness.

The king has seen those flames before, swimming in his mother's eyes. The color is identical, as is the cold. There is something in the sight of those green flames that makes his stomach turn and he wishes to look away, but can't.

He overwatches the black scorch numbly. It was supposed to be mother's trial today. Things are always more complicated than he seems to realize. He has spent his reign feeling like the only person never to be taught or told something very important, and he could never quite put a finger on what it was.

Margaery would have told him not to worry. She would have thread her gentle fingers through his yellow hair, more sweetly than mother ever did, and she would laugh his troubles away, then kiss his worries better and mend whatever concerns he may have had. He loves her for this. More than all the Seven Kingdoms. Certainly more than Ser Pounce. Yet he could not defend her, _her_ , not once, not when it really counted.

He cannot fathom what she must be looking like now. He cannot fathom how she could be gone at all. She was just there this morning, getting her beautiful brown hair braided and preparing to leave for the carriage.

She can't be gone. He must have been with her but Ser Gregor wouldn't let him. Mother's doing. All of it. He always wanted to do right by her, by Margaery, by grandfather, back when he was still alive, by all the people of King's Landing. He has never taken any joy in doing cruel things.

The black spot standing for where the sept towered until just a few moments ago seems to be widening, gaping like a beast preparing to swallow. He hopes against all hope Margaery has somehow escaped. But even if she has, mother will surely kill her before she even sets foot on the first step of the Red Keep.

Tommen does not understand. Mother wishes only his well-fare. That's what she's told him over and over. Why would she do this?

Deep down he knows the answer.

Mother is cruel. Mother is more like Joffrey than she is like Myrcella, even though the two of them looked very similar the last time he laid eyes on his sister's cold white face.

"I'm very sorry, Your Grace."

The voice doesn't startle him, but it connects him to reality, somehow, and he loses his detachedness along with something else. Something snaps in him and the crown is suddenly not right for him any longer. It feels designed for another's head, has always felt designed for another's head.

He never wanted to be king. But grandfather put him on the throne, _in_ the throne, alone with all the sharp enemy blades, and mother dragged her finger over his lips and turned his smile downwards and he cannot bear to the thought of her anymore, just as he cannot bear to look at the slow fire.

He knows what to do, then.

He takes the crown off his head and it feels as if the heaviest burden in the world has been uplifted and he is free to breathe again. He rests it on the table, because that would be the kingly thing to do, and he wishes to be that, for once.

He leaps from the tower and the ground rushes to meet him, all traces of green flames gone at long last.


	3. Jaime

Jaime

Up until tonight, he's never truly appreciated the true awfulness of the warped wart that is Walder Frey's nose. Facing the obnoxious thing over the course of a feast already wearying on for far too long, with nothing but its damnable arch to keep company with, Jaime can't help feeling like one of those wretches forever dying on the Bolton colors. Only it isn't some sharpened razor peeling the flesh off him, it's every subsequent breath he wastes maundering at Frey's rotten table and away from Cersei. He should be back with her by now, he should be there when they try her for a sin that is as much his as it is hers.

The giggling women exhibiting their scantily dressed forms are mere shadows in the background behind the nub of Frey's smeller. They don't hold a moment's appeal to him, and neither does their lord's frustrating prattle. As if the old goat has any right to talk about the honor Jaime doesn't have.

No one ever has any wish to shake the hand that once drove a sword through a kingly back, as it would appear, as if the blade were still attached to the rest of him presently. No place for Kingslayers in a world where every other sort of killer is thrice welcome. Even if the king was mad and, in that one death, a thousand viscous green beasts were nursed to sleep in their pots before they ever hissed their fiery hiss and ate the city whole.

The hand that nobody will shake is made of gold now, though. No point in reaching for it anyway.

"We don't mind, do we, Kingslayer?" Frey rumbles and his creaky, ghastly voice scrapes Jaime's ears like fingernails digging paths through raw chalk.

It's getting on Jaime's last bits of patience, the way the grizzled lecher sneers and leers and sits there like a stone toad, refusing to die or so much as budge an inch just to spite the world around him. He looks like a giant faded carp and Jaime would gladly bash his face against a wall were it not for the fact that he may as well be their one remaining ally not to have died or turned on them. Miserable day for house Lannister when their last living foe is someone of the likes of Walder Frey.

Jaime wagers the man's made a hundred sons and daughters in his time, and they have spawned hundreds upon hundreds in turn, and yet there he stands, refusing to let any of them sit their arse on his chair while he's out to take a piss.

 _Must be afraid they'll like it all too much._

It doesn't take much to cause an old man's health to deteriorate. Jon Arryn has been example enough. Jaime doesn't like to think of that. Reminds him of that Stark boy. _The things we do for love._

He dreams of Cersei when he falls asleep that night, of her lips curled as pious septas pluck her beautiful golden locks from her head until her hair is not much longer than a wench's, a wench with a sword named after oaths and the keeping of them. There are two women by his side, then, he cannot tell the one from the other, two women, one blonde, the other blonder, one kissing and peppering his ear with sweet whispers, the other resting a solemn hand on his shoulder, both insistent in their own right, and he chokes and lets them have a pull at his worn flesh, he doesn't know what they want from him.

Come the morrow, he rides hard for King's Landing.

* * *

Smoke oozes up in the sky from the gaping pit that stands for the city's miserable pivot. It looks like a grey dragon reaching for the clouds, and it reeks of death and rot and green heat Jaime only ever gets to smell in his worst nightmares. He swallows the lump in his throat, refuses to think of his sister's golden curls burned and merged with the haze, and spurs his horse on.

The once-proud Great Sept of Baelor and its surrounding loin are ash occluding his throat and watering his eyes as he bypasses the near-crater.

He marches into the Red Keep desperately hoping to find his sister alive. Instead, he finds her the queen.

Seated on that very same man-eating throne Jaime has witnessed swallowing kings whole since before Robert, she nearly looks like a part of it. The thing becomes her, and she becomes it, and it frightens the seven hells out of Jaime. It carries her too well, better than it did Robert's fat belly, better than it did Joffrey's boyish bulk, certainly better than it did Tommen's poor limp shoulders that used to shake like leaves among the biting enemy blades.

He can't say he hasn't wondered. What she would look like, perched up on the Iron Throne, a true lioness in heat to give the chair something to live up to. He'd tried picturing it, even recreate it, on the day Robert sacked the city, when he sat himself on the bloody thing, because he thought himself the closest thing to Cersei at the time. He sees now he has been wrong. His sister looks nothing like him up there. She seems comfortable and atune to it in ways he never did, and in this one moment all his worst fears are confirmed.

Her gown is all crisp and liquefied blackness, her silver crown a natural continuation to the melted swords' sharp-cut forms. It catches the refracted dim light of the torches, breaks it and then makes it anew, steals it from all other things in the room and holds it there at its center as if it won't be giving it up.

She looks like a messenger of death in all her dark glory, and Jaime is both terrified and fascinated by the sight of her.

He watches on as his sister goes along with this surreal play, furiously scraping himself off thoughts such as the fact that the last person to have sat so well in that throne was the king he had to stab in the back.

She is sharper than when he last saw her, somehow, less gold and more steel, all cuts and scars and acute edges. For all her frightfulness, though, it is her eyes that make his breath catch hard in his throat - that fierce green that knew no bounds when it came to their children, it's lost its motherly spark, and in its place lingers a more dangerous, rapturous flash, one Jaime refuses to admit to having born witness to before.

Her whole being is dancing on the verge of something horrible and irreversible as she takes their dead sons' place and crowns herself queen of damned, overlooking a sea of frightened men and women. From her stronghold atop a mountain cut from ancient swords and rusted blood, she seems illusively invincible.

Jaime wants to look away, but finds that he cannot. Not this time.

Miserable truth be told, he's always known. Somewhere in a dank soil at the back of his skull, he's always been aware of it, that unnamed aught clawing at his sister's shadow, doing its slow workings when no one looks her way.

When they were children, they'd oftentimes play till dusk in the gardens of Casterly Rock, pretending to be king and queen, man and wife, damsel and her simple knight. It was innocent then, stripped of all implications, just brother and sister balancing on the edge between the warm embrace of childhood and a world so cold. But even then there had been signs. Even then. Just touches. Looks. A tug on the hair by greedy fingers, the briefest of bites on his shoulder when he'd refuse to let her win a game. Stealing his wooden swords - because that's all he's ever cared for, right from the beginning, that and her - when he refused to beat a servant girl for her. Small acts of cruelty no one pays heed to in the day's hurry. All glimpses of what was to come. He used to be certain he had a haunt of his own too, but he sees now he has been wrong. It is her demon feeding off them both, it has been it all along.

He'd seen it and he'd looked the other way. He wishes to do so now too, but his stump aches, as does something inside him that should be long dead, and so he looks on.

Eventually, his sister answers his look with one of her own. She doesn't even seem surprised. Or grieving. Or glad. She doesn't seem anything, and that is the worst she could possibly seem. She stares him down from across the great hall, her eyes nothing but that simmer he's tried to dismiss over and over throughout the years. For the first time since they were born, their eyes don't match. Jaime clenches his jaw.

It's all in the open, now, and there is no evading the reality of it.

 _I've broken all the vows there are for her._

The space where his right hand used to be itches. He hooks his left one over the gilded hilt of his longsword instead, holding Cersei's gaze. He'll speak to her. He'll try and make her listen. But a part of him knows her answer already.

 _Our father must be laughing like a bloody pumpkin in the seventh hell._


	4. Cersei

Cersei

The bells are ringing for her once again. Theirs is an awfully familiar tune, at this point, the hollow noises singing ballads for an enemy that she has roused from the dirt with her very hands and placed in a seat of power. The fanatic won't win. Not when her life is at stake, Tommen's life with hers, and she has everything and nothing to lose. So she bides her time. No matter how hard the High Sparrow thinks he can rings those bells, a lion comes out of her den when she pleases and not before.

The cursed bells keep clanking.

She knows full-well this is his battle horn, his way of summoning her to grovel at his feet again. The very sound ignites things within her, memories, the sickening cheer of the crowd rebounding in her head as if she were still down there, amidst the morass of the narrow streets, rendered bare and helpless as a cub, surrounded on all sides by leering faces and drawn-out peasantry hands.

Today is different from then, Cersei reminds herself. Today, Cersei Lannister shall answer with a roar of her own.

She watches as the miserable city below her shifts and shuffles, tremors of anticipation jouncing through its very bowels. Its every filthy alley, its every slovenly nook, none fails to deliver their share of insects, dutifully spewing strings of unwashed commoners into the gaping mouth of the Great Sept of Baelor, that holy place of torture and insolence. It is the knowledge that today is the last day it stands as it is – tall and arrogant and close to almighty, nearly looming over the Red Keep itself, that Cersei finds comfort in, and she casts her gaze down to the city with renewed resentment, eyes no wider than slits.

She is only able to discern tiny currents of bodies flowing from the vicinity of Flea Bottom and towards the bulk of the holy sept, but it is enough to make the hairs on her neck bristle. Oh, how she loathes them all.

A repugnant beast, this great city of kings, choking on its own foulness and delusions the way Robert did on his deathbed. It needs a cleansing, the whole of it. It begs for it.

Cersei's had a disgust for it for as long as she can remember. All those crawling things, small and filthy and ever-circulating down there, faces scorched, they unsettle her. They always seem to be cradling a hunger of some sort: for bread, for flesh, for the blood of their betters, and for that alone a gruesome death for each and every one of them is more than warranted.

But her disgust has intensified over time, evolved into a loathing unlike any other. For as of recently, the city has been stirred and madness is dripping from its every corner. The beast has cast its gaze upwards, towards places it has no pretension to look at. Cersei had been blind to the slow limbering-up of the swamp, and she sees now that therein lays her greatest mistake.

And now the creature has roused its foul, ugly, thousand-eyed head up at her with no concession to shame. It throws her off to not be feared, and it spooks her to be so openly despised, and it finally angers her to be mocked and pointed at by accusatory fingers. It summons up a thirst within her that no chalice of wine will ever be able to quench.

 _As if they are in their right to question me, of all people, the lion, their queen and a Lannister._

This thirst she perceives, it is more of a craving. It frets her bones rather than the beginnings of her throat, and it makes her avid for blood, the blood of that thing that sneers at her and caricatures her.

They have humiliated her, but that has not been enough for them. The vermin is always hungry, never sated. Its appetites turn from cruel to crueler, and it will not suffice for them to see the high and mighty fall down hard. They had her stripped of her dignity, her power, her influence; and now they all wish nothing more than to see her stricken down, head rolling for their brutish entertainment.

The High Sparrow, Cersei knows, he is the head of the serpent.

He plays the mindless masses well, his blind religious prattling carrying on a wave of false promises. For justice, for mercy, for holding power over kings and queens. All that sweet nothingness the worms listen to with their ears perked up like good little rabbits. He even had her only boy turn from her and to the treacherous lot. She finds her hatred for the shoeless peasant growing tenfold at the thought.

 _What would you do in my stead, father? Would you treat them any differently, those who threaten to drag our house to ruin? They'd return this world to the bestial pit it once was if they had it their way._

But that's the sort of catastrophe kings stand to prevent, and Cersei Lannister had birthed two and buried more.

 _Soon_ , she wants to promise each and every one of those who'd wronged her, impoverished zealots and noble turn-cloaks alike, so that they'll know what's coming. _Soon you'll all know your place again_.

She wishes for them to be able to foretell it, to look their own undoing in the eye and still be stranded in the face of their downfall, the same as she was all this time in that dank stale dungeon, with no power, no name, no respect, not even the basest of needs seen to.

Cersei pours herself a glass of dense black wine once the maid is done with her garments, and she settles near the window, eyes fixed on the swell of the Great Sept. She inhales the revolting smells of the city through flared nostrils, allows it all to wash over her along with the immediate memories that flood her mind whenever she thinks of all those blackened streets and the last time she was forced into marching upon them. She exhales slowly, imagining herself the dragon turning all things to dust through the vortex of her breath. No more of that. No one shall force her to do anything against her will, ever again. She will remind them all just what it means to vex a lion and be unprepared for its wrath.

For once the black she has donned herself in is not for her children. It is a good black. One for celebrating rather than mourning. It is for her each and every enemy, all that grime under her nails that she is about to rid herself of.

 _Soon,_ she tells herself this time, a soothing lullaby for the hate that coils within her. She will hold Qyburn and his little birds to that promise. She doesn't allow herself any thoughts of possible failure, because there isn't going to be one. The gods that spat on her over and over owe her this much, and she will jerk her victory from their bleeding hands before she lets them mock her again.

 _I cringed for them once. It's time they did the same for me._

Cersei keeps her face a mask of ice, and steels herself for what's to come.

The very air is soaked with the wretched city's hate for her as the bells ring on, all those faces fused, the hapless cavalcade riding out the ugly, savage symphony for the last time.

She waits by the window, a lion in stall, biding her time, waiting, waiting, forever waiting. She discovers that, for once in her life, she has the patience. She even enjoys it, in a way, the slow build-up to when everything will collapse in on this one instant of death and destruction. She has waited for this for far too long, and wishes nothing more than to savor every moment of it.

She regards the sept, downtiming until the air is ripe and the more perceptive of witnesses are probably starting to realize that there is something amiss. She plays out the scenario in her head in parallel with what she imagines must be occurring on the inside of the Great Sept.

Her uncle, perhaps, will be the first one to speak. He's always been a nosy, meddlesome weasel in his little impressions of her father, miserable attempts that only ever served to get him to where he is today.

Or maybe the little rose herself. Her grandmother fled the city at the first signs of actual danger, the old cowardly frog, her royal father is a few ribbons short of a courtly fool, and her brother's mind has probably been turned to mush over the course of his extensive stay in the cells, and so who is left to take care of the flock except for the little rose, poised and dutiful as ever?

Cersei hopes it is her indeed who urges everyone to seek a way out. She craves to see the sheer horror marring the whore's pretty face as the realization slowly sinks in that there will be no escaping the claws of Cersei Lannister today. Practicality has denied Cersei this chance, but where her eyes can't reach, her imagination is more than willing to fill in.

The High Sparrow will be the last one to see what's happening in truth. She is counting on it. Cersei closes her eyes and almost sees them, traitors swarming at the exits, crammed together like sheep, trembling at the feet of the lion. It will be a lesson for all of them out there, friends and foes alike.

It's so close, her rightful vengeance, she can almost feel it crackling at her fingertips.

 _You brought this on yourselves, all of you,_ Cersei thinks as anticipation builds within her _. No one reaches for the lion's throat and leaves unscathed._

It's so good when it finally happens. So very good.

It begins with a rumble, one that runs so deep she can feel it stirring beneath her, setting up an enormous force to be let loose. And then it's a roar, magnificent and purifying and lion-like.

She watches, eyes wide, taking in the beauty of that green deity swallowing the last of her enemies. It's invincible, untouchable, _perfect_ , exceeding even the wildest works of her imagination. Nothing has ever made her feel this high, this queenly, this powerful. Not Robert when he crowned her his wife, not Jaime when he buried himself inside of her for the first time. She feels complete, at long last, after a seemingly endless period of torture and doubt and silent venom festering her insides when all she'd wanted was to let it out.

Her mind fills with the most exquisite images as she pictures scorched roses framed by the charred idols of seven dead gods.

 _Yes_ , Cersei Lannister thinks, dizzy. _Oh yes_.

A rare, excited smile is smeared across her lips as she inhales the smell of ashes with wild relish. It's like holding Joffrey for the first time all over again, only this time there is no fear creeping at the back of her head that someone awful might snatch her joy from the tips of her fingers. They're all dead, down to the last filthy hypocrite, and there is no one left to harm her or take away what's hers.

She takes a sip from her wine before she exits the room. It's thick and stings sweetly on her tongue, and it is all too easy to imagine it is their blood she gulps, their screams she swallows, their schemes and misplaced ambitions that die out at the recesses of her throat.

"Confess," she says, sings, almost, when she descends to the dungeons for one final task.

"Confess," she repeats, the one word around which is concentrated all of her hatred for this despicable, deluded woman. " _Confess._ "

It feels good, even if Cersei is the one who ends up confessing to all sorts of things, and she tells the septa as much, watching the woman's wine-stained face twitch in effort to maintain its outer serenity. The words pour out as smoothly as the wine, and Cersei enjoys every moment of her former overseer's discomfort as she traces her hand down the woman's lower belly and thighs. _Feel what I felt each and every time you loomed over me. See what I saw every time you had me kneel before you in prayer to your wretched gods._

Hate coils tighter within her as she delivers the news of the High Sparrow's demise in her most cruel voice, the precious gem she cold-hammers into the crown of the woman's torture. She nearly laughs out loud when the dull thing is foolish enough to assume she would end this for her today.

"You're not going to die today," Cersei mocks. After all, playthings are allowed to have playthings of their own, and ser Gregor has proved to be such a useful tool as of late, she feels she owes him this gift.

"Shame," she chants as she exits, her voice punctuated by the woman's piercing screams _._ "Shame," she says again, and it liberates her, in a way, of all meanings that the word once carried.

When news of Tommen reaches her ears, she is oddly calm. She expects the tears to come crashing in on her, but they don't, not when she ascends to the Red Keep's upper floors, black skirts whispering around her in the tongue of expensive fabric, not when they nudge open the door to the chamber containing what's left of her son, not when she tells Qyburn to lift up the shroud so she can lay eyes upon her dead child, the last of them.

 _No great victory comes without a price._

Her baby boy is unrecognizable beneath the blanket, his face twisted and his skin peeled in spots. The only familiar thing left are his golden locks, his beautiful golden locks, so like his mother's and father's, but even that stirs close to nothing within her. She feels empty, the satisfaction from earlier evaporated along with something else she can't quite put a finger on.

She exits the room and pours herself a glass of Arbor Gold, and she feels like a skeleton as it gushes down her insides and does not hold. It doesn't spring on her, the decision. At some point, as nightfall swallows the sun, she simply realizes she already knows what she is going to do.

When she claims the Iron Throne, she feels like it does away with some of the emptiness, filling her with steel and crowns and cravings for more broken enemy blades.

"Long may she reign," Qyburn declares, and the crowd follows, fright seeping into their voices, and it's all like sweet music to her, because being ruled through fear is exactly what this wretched realm deserves.

 _Are you watching, father? I, the daughter, am the one who brought house Lannister to such heights. I, the one you kept overlooking, and not your sons._

Jaime gives her a look, from the crowd, a look that bodes trouble. He is not pleased, of course, but she is his other half, and so she answers with a look of her own.

 _Are you not glad for me, brother? Why don't you come closer? Or are you afraid I might burn you?_

He should be. They all should. A woman rules them now, with no drunken fool by her side to soften her hand.

She doesn't wiggle in the throne for it seems to accept her. This is where you belong, it tells her. It accommodates a glorious view over them all, and her eyes skim over her conquest in guarded triumph. From somewhere this high, she imagines, even somebody like her father might seem paltry.

The queen sinks back in her throne, contemplating her next move. She hopes they're not completely biddable, the lot of them. She'd very much like to see the green flames dance again.


	5. Arya

Arya

She watches Jaime Lannister drink cheek by jowl with Walder Frey, and while she has no doubts in respect to the host's fate, she is not yet sure what to do with the firstborn son of Tywin Lannister. He carries the lion sigil carved on his breastplate, and for that alone she wants him dead. She can think of nothing easier than to have one of the poisons she has learned by heart sipped in his cup by ownerless hands.

Still, she doesn't make a move for his chalice.

She remembers seeing him a lifetime ago, arriving in the Norh, her _father's_ North, with the king's royal envoy. It all seems awfully far away, the time when she had more than just Needle to remind her that she was Arya Stark of Winterfell. She'd envied Jaime Lannister for the slick burnished armor then.

She'd made quick judgment of him, because he hadn't been all too hard to figure out: the queen's spoiled, arrogant brother, riding high on his white horse with his chin lifted up, more engrossed in keeping his hair long and golden and prettier than Sansa's than in protecting his king. He'd walked with the step of someone used to having things done for him, and he'd looked down at her father as if he'd considered himself worthier. He'd even mocked Jon and the cold of the weather with a light hand. There had been a shrewd vanity about him, and it had made him seem like an act even though people said he was one of the finest swordsmen alive.

 _If this is what a knight looks like, I'd rather be a stable boy_ , Arya recalls thinking.

She sees there's not much of that left now. The cant has been drained from him, as well as the sly confidence. She imagines the missing hand must have to do with it. The day she can no longer wield Needle will be the day she curls up in a ball and dies. She sees a part of him is dead indeed, or dying, at the very least. His hair is chopped and his unshaven face looks wan in the candlelight; deep half-moons creep under his eyes, making them seem more tired than daring. His shoulders are limp, and it does not befit a Kingslayer to look so human, not at all.

In that one cruel moment Arya thinks that Cersei Lannister must be like a desease, not only to the kind and noble but to all the people around her. _She's left her mark, even on her brother._

It's not merely the Kingslayer's exterior that's altering her take on him. Arya knows she's changed too. Now that she has shifted into many people, it is easier for her to understand how someone can be false and decent at the same time, how a woman might poison someone else's child and risk her life to salvage her own, how kindness and cruelty can coexist in the same heart. He reminds her of that, Jaime Lannister, and he also makes her think of how Bran must have been, a crippled boy, alone with the ghost of the life he has known, and she feels, for the first time in her life, that what the Many-Faced God has taken from house Stark, he's taken from the Lannisters too.

She allows him to walk, because he is not on her list, and he is not on it for a reason.

Walder Frey is of a different breed. He deserves it. For Robb and for her mother, for all of house Stark, he deserves every ounce of effort she puts into chopping his sons to bits in order to serve them to him warm and twitching. She is right on time, and she only endures the rumbling of his voice for so long before she springs her plan on him.

She rolls her false face down and savors every little emotion crossing lord Frey's elderly features. He seems at least as old as Old Nan, if not older, but where her wrinkles had been the result of the occasional frown at pesky children, Arya knows that his are born of drunken laughter over the dead bodies of noble men and women like her mother and brother. He is so infinitely pathetic as he gasps in shock when he sees her real face emerge from under the mask. There is nothing wise about him. He doesn't even possess Tywin Lannister's cold authority. Arya almost cannot believe that such a man had slain down Robb.

 _It wasn't him_ , she reminds herself. _Such cowards never do the things they are given credit for in person._

Which is why she'd taken care of his sons as well.

She thinks of her brother as she holds him down forcefully, of her father as she tells him who she is in cold-blooded, winter pride, of how the last face he sees shall belong to none other than a Stark, and finally of her mother as she slits his throat open with a measured drag of her wrist. The sound of metal hissing on skin is something she has grown familiar with, and it carries with it a deep sense of correction. She feels like with that one kill she is setting some of what's been done to her family right, and so she draws out the motion deliberately, fingers unflinching, never flinching, wanting to see the blood dance in squirts.

 _The North remembers_ , Arya Stark thinks as she departs, smiling. _The North does not forget._


	6. Jon

Jon

Both ser Davos and the priestess are looking at him as if he ought to have all the answers. Everyone looks at him this way, ever since the red woman reached out and retrieved him from the land of nothingness. And when he rode past his little brother's lifeless body and led a battle lost ahead of time, they ran after him, and followed him into the jaws of death.

He knows what death is, better than anyone. The schooling hasn't made him braver. If anything, it's made him tired. He feels worn out, and thinner, like part of him is still left to linger on the other side. _No_ , Jon reminds himself, _there is no other side._

There is no place where honor is rewarded and cowardice is punished, and yet here he stands, still the honorable bastard that got stabbed by his sworn brothers. Why he clings to decency he doesn't know. Perhaps it is the only way he knows to live. Perhaps he wishes to be as the dead remember him (he feels his father's wintry gaze upon him still, always, even though he hasn't met him in the afterlife). But living in service of the dead is not the way Jon wants to spend whatever's left of his time on this earth. He wants to live for the living, and, even after all the ugliness and falsehood that he has encountered, he wishes to do right by this world.

They all must sense that, for they trust him, and they place their trust in him, and it's a burden so ample he nearly breaks under the weight of it all.

They all expect he has the answers. Truth is he does not. He knows he isn't wise enough by half for the responsibility they thrust into his hands. He doesn't know what to make of a woman who burns children alive and names him champion of her god after.

Ser Davos' face is reddened with righteous fury when he demands for her head, but then she opens her mouth and her words are as always: reaching blindly for something within him, and he cannot force himself to say the words, because then he'd have to swing the sword, and something inside him shifts in furious protest at the thought of that.

"You know I can help you," she says, her arcane eyes piercing him, and a part of him nods in voiceless agreement. He's known this woman long enough to understand her words are not all wind. He doesn't know what they are, but he knows they are what brought him back to this life, and if they are madness, then he is the madness' brood. For that, he responds to ser Davos' bidding with another set of words, words that won't take a life, but are also not for the keeping of it.

He watches her ride away from Winterfell, and he feels like he has made a mistake. _Even if she had stayed, there is no reason I would not have shared Stannis' fate._

He turns away and strolls to meet with Sansa. A sting surges through him at the thought of her, but he knows he is in no right to feel insulted. It is not the time to fight amongst each other, and it is her help that brought them victory.

Their talk is short-spoken at first, but they are honest, both of them, and in time Jon finds all traces of his anger gone. They are of the same blood, she and him, and she calls him a Stark, and he thinks that there may be times when she is cold and distant and reminds him of her mother, but then there are moments like this when she is warm and open and he sees more of Arya in her than Catelyn Stark. It is moments like this that he truly feels like she allows him to be her brother, and he smiles at her for it.

They echo their father's words as they depart from each other, and even though the snows are cold and their bite is frosty on their faces, they silently agree: winter is what they have been waiting for.

 **A/N: Sorry to let you down, Mina M, I read how excited you were for a Sansa goodie, it's just that Jon's chapter sort of happened first. Sansa's is up next, I promise, so bear with me**!


End file.
